Julian Assange turns up as Marge and Homer's new neighbour in the 500th episode of The Simpsons. Photograph: Fox

The Simpsons is often – and inevitably – criticised for not being as good as it used to be. But when it came to the 500th episode, shown on Fox on Sunday night, reviewers gave it something of a break.

Much of the reaction was generous, although praise tended to be qualified by noting the show's generally agreed-upon decline and harking back to the glory days of earlier seasons.

"So the 500th episode wasn't better than the 50th? Who cares? This icon transcends seasons," wrote the Hollywood Reporter, summing up the goodwill most reviewers felt towards the hugely successful comedy. The review, which was generally positive, compared The Simpsons to "a great sports hero that keeps playing because it/he/she still loves the game, and still understands that it/he/she can still get it done sometimes".

The plot of At Long Last Leave, the 14th episode of the 23rd season, involved the residents of Springfield deciding collectively to evict the Simpsons from the town – neighbours were particularly irked by Homer's "drunken shenanigans" and Bart's pranks, which "dwindle in humour as they rise in destruction".

As more than one review pointed out, the premise of the show was not a new one, with The Simpsons having been driven out of Springfield by an angry mob on more than one occasion (including in the 2007 The Simpsons Movie). From TV Fanatic:

The whole "Simpsons as social pariahs" isn't a new theme. We've seen it in a Halloween episode, a Christmas one and even in the The Simpsons Movie. The repetitive nature of the newest Simpsons episodes is probably one of the hardest things to cope with as a long-time fan of the sitcom. However, this time it didn't really detract too much from the fun of the episode.

As Hit Fix noted: "At this incredibly advanced — but by no means decrepit — age, The Simpsons has no choice but to present variations on themes and stories you've seen at least two or three times already."

So it is that, banished from their home, the Simpsons end up living in The Outlands, a dirty, down-at-heel town where they find Julian Assange, in a brief cameo, as their neighbour. With some inevitability, the rest of Springfield finds that, despite having been so staunchly critical of the family, in the end they cannot live without them. Metaphor perhaps?

In terms of the standard of the episode itself, AV Club reckoned it marked "the exact center of Simpsons quality".

If last week's episode was mediocre, this one was the median Simpsons episode, somehow arriving in the center of the bell curve in almost every conceivable way that defines the show, not too dumb or smart, not too funny or dull, not too outlandish or pedestrian, not too mean or kind.

"I got a few laughs and that's all I ever look for in The Simpsons these days," said the Hollywood Reporter's reviewer in a mostly positive look back over the history of the show and its history, while Ksite TV though there was "enough humor and heart thrown in that this feels like an episode worthy of the milestone":

The jokes that worked were very funny, and there was genuine heart at the episode's end, something the Simpsons has often missed in its most recent years. Even if some of the steps getting there were a little rocky, the result is still a nice shout-out to why we loved the show in the first place: a funny, flawed-yet-still-loveable family of misfits just living their wacky lives.

The end of the show featured a title card thanking viewers, before acknowledging the modern-day perception of the show in general.

"Thanks for 500 shows," it read. "All we ask is that you go out and get some fresh air before logging onto the internet and saying how much this sucked."

With most of the reviews, for once, being pretty generous, it would seem plenty of people took that advice.